Vindaloo and Ahsoka Too
In Which I Do My Best Patton Oswalt Impression and Other Old Man Yelling at Clouds Monday Miscellany
Short notes:
The vindaloo was…pretty good? I think I put too much broth in it and the strong spicing got a bit diluted. I got lazy and didn’t make chapatis, so we just had it on rice.
I haven’t been interested in Ahsoka, really. Something inside of me has snapped when it comes to Star Wars of any kind. On one end, the Boba Fett series really disenchanted me. (I’m still astonished at the number of fans who didn’t like most of it but liked the Lawrence of Arabia stuff about the Tuskens, because it just shows you that if you’re ripping off something that has passed out of the memory of younger people you can be pretty shameless.) It was so lifeless and tonally messy and scared to take a chance and do something seamier and harder about the Star Wars underworld. And Boba Fett + the Mandalorian really disenchanted me in other ways: they made plain that nobody’s got a vision over there, and especially that nobody’s got a vision of what kind of stories to tell about the time between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.
On the other end, Andor has made me feel completely differently about the potential of Star Wars as a storytelling platform. Andor felt so relevant to our moment: to how fascism and evil can creep into our lives, how people can see authoritarianism as a career opportunity or a chance to escape a bad life, how people can think that things aren’t so bad and then suddenly discover that they’ve become very bad the hard way. But it also was just a well-told story in every sense. So that’s ruined my patience with weak stories. I just can’t look past a six-year old girl managing to evade two thugs in the forest filmed as if she was playing tag with friendly adults, or blatant padding of what should have been a pivotal, wrenching story built around the best actor (Ewan McGregor) to appear in post-OT Star Wars (until Andor).
I did decide to check out the 5th episode of Ahsoka, which has some fans very excited because of the return of Hayden Christiansen. I think that much was interesting because it’s just further proof (as if any more was needed) that George Lucas wrote horrible screenplays and was terrible at directing actors except perhaps for American Graffiti. (I haven’t seen that for decades, so maybe I’d change my mind even about that if I watched it.) But at the same time, even without knowing what’s been going on with the characters from Dave Filoni’s Rebels show in this post-Return of the Jedi timeframe, I found myself so irritated with the military officers from the New Republic who edged into the last 15 minutes of the episode.
Why? Because they’re idiots. Officious idiots. And somehow that just breaks me as much as perhaps this same time period in the legendarium of Star Wars seems to have broken Luke Skywalker. The people making Star Wars now seem unable to creatively synchronize with the accidentally-canonical nature of the diegetical politics within their long-developing franchise. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, since they’re a clumsy megacorporation that files the rough edges off of almost everything they own.)
They still don’t seem to understand what the entire legendarium has revealed about the Jedi Order, which is that it was badly flawed at the deepest levels. And they don’t seem to understand that the Old Republic fell to the authoritarian wiles of Shreev Palpatine, aka The Emperor, because the Old Republic was as flawed as the Jedi. It was too big, too bureaucratic, too corrupt, too unable to synchronize its highest ideals with its unjust realities. But that’s why it’s so heart-breaking and annoying all at once to have New Republic officers show up and be so officiously stupid that they threaten to arrest a general and a powerful Jedi-adjacent ally just because they don’t know what the 411 is. Really? After all that star warring, we just go back to Luke being a dumb Jedi asshole making dumb Jedi mistakes with his one student (and then doing it again with his nephew) and the New Republic making dumb bureaucratic mistakes?
I can’t even tell if that just a failure of creative imagination or if it’s an indictment of a larger failure of imagination that goes well beyond the corporate limitations of Disney. Maybe the Powers That Be just can’t think of the “good guys” as being anything but dumbly smug bureaucrats and a handful of “disruptors” who have to be allowed to do their thing.As more evidence for the failed imaginations of the Powers That Be, the fact that the Democratic leadership in Washington doesn’t seem to give a shit that most of their own voters don’t want the candidate that they’re coronating as the only possible choice as we head into an election that might once again be the difference between an ostensible democracy and an overt dictatorship. They’re counting on American voters to once again make the only sensible choice possible even when those voters are screaming inside about the re-staging of the worst, most traumatic election of their political lives. And of course I will do the only sensible thing, but I’m building up a fathomlessly deep well of resentment and bitterness in the process.
It does help, I suppose, that the Republican Party in the United States is working overtime to make themselves so fundamentally indecent that any other possibility on the limited menu of choices that the Powers of Be are prepared to allow is preferable. The news from Texas isn’t surprising—these days, it never is, I wouldn’t blink if I read that the governor of Texas has set up machine gun pillboxes on the north bank of the Rio Grande and has ordered anyone in the river to be shot on sight, or that he’s ordered martial law in the city of Austin and the forced deportation out of Texas of any Austin resident registered as a Democrat. But the GOP and their core supporters have fully transitioned to the position that they can commit no crimes and that they are by definition morally upstanding regardless of their personal conduct. Just ask Representative Boebert, whom the New York Times reported (with ridiculously decorous evasiveness given what’s on surveillance video) to have been “touching and carrying on with her date”, vaping and making a lot of noise in the middle of a musical performance with plenty of teenagers in the audience. If the GOP does it, at best it’s just “falling short of values”, and more likely, it’s just Christian family values redefined.
Image credit: "WonderCon 2011 - Ahsoka Tano and Aayla Secura costumes" by Doug Kline is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Disappointing that Ashoka is not good. If anything, it seems like Filoni has regressed: much of what I liked about Rebels involved the lived-in, gradual, persistent nature of dictatorship (adjusted for the medium), and much of what I liked about Mando S1 was that it could make a single chicken walker seem like a Terminator. It’s depressing that for all the attention and capital thrown at these projects there has been no sense that creative work doesn’t scale up like other projects--there’s a limit to how much good stuff any brand can present if it’s working in tight canonical bounds. But there don’t seem to be many folks at Lucasfilm with taste or respect for audiences, and few folks at Disney who understand the value of letting franchises grow rather than strip mining them.